Existing network services provide remoting to a thin client, very thin client or other machine having limited resources. In client/server applications using a thin client, the client is designed to be especially small so that the bulk of the data processing occurs on the server. For example, remoting to a client may provide interface graphical data to a thin client which is a low-cost, centrally-managed computer usually devoid of CD-ROM players, diskette drives, and expansion slot. A remote session allows a user to login to a server through the thin client. For example, a server may provide user interface graphics to render at the client in response to user input received at the client and provided to the server.
The efficiency of previous remoting methods used for remote sessions for thin clients does not provide a viable solution to remoting issues involved with rich interfaces. In particular, when remoting a user interface with rich graphics to a thin client, previous remoting methods do not process updates to a user interface with the speed and performance that users have come to expect from modern network services. Even on a very capable client, the richness of an “entertainment centric” user interface does not correlate to efficient remoting. For example, with a normal desktop user interface, a simple command to fill a rectangle in the user interface frame can be sent to fill the background white before text is rendered using basic glyphs. However, if the user interface is a richly rendered UI with the background generated by a designer using a drawing program, photo-realistic frame and text that is anti-aliased using advanced rendering techniques to blend with that background, there are no simple commands which can be remoted to the client to achieve the resulting graphics in the frame. As a result, the frame data itself must be sent to the client. Even with modern bulk compression techniques, transmitting bitmapped graphics for a user interface frame can be expensive in terms of network bandwidth and client processing resources.